August 1, 2018
Page 13
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O PINION
An Unhappy Birthday for Medicare and Medicaid
Both programs very
much under siege
m artha b urk
July 30 marks a very
important anniversary
in our modern political
history.
Fifty-three
years
ago in 1965, President
Lyndon Johnson signed
Medicare and Medicaid
into law, creating two programs that would
disproportionately improve the lives of
older and low-income Americans — espe-
cially women.
Fast-forward to 2018, and both programs
are very much under siege. Nowhere is the
struggle starker than in the House Republi-
can budget — titled “A Brighter American
Future” — now on Capitol Hill.
The importance of Medicare as a source
of women’s health coverage can’t be
over-emphasized.
Older and disabled women make up
more than half the total beneficiaries, and
two-thirds of those 85 and over. This bud-
get from hell takes a giant step toward pri-
vatizing the program by allowing insurance
companies into the Medicare marketplace,
which means benefits could be caught in a
by
race to the bottom and become too paltry
to cover all but the barest of medical needs.
Medicaid is the joint federal-state pro-
gram that provides low-income people
with health care. The proposed Republican
budget repeals the Medicaid expansion that
That approach makes it easier to cut the
program without saying how many people
would be dropped, or how much benefits
would be lowered.
Since poor women under retirement age
and their children are the biggest group
The Medicaid remnants that survive
would be turned into block grants, allowing
states to pick and choose who gets covered
and what kind of benefits they get — no
doubt with little or no federal oversight.
That approach makes it easier to cut the
program without saying how many people
would be dropped, or how much benefits
would be lowered.
came with Obamacare, which will cause
14 to 17 million people to lose coverage.
The Medicaid remnants that survive
would be turned into block grants, allow-
ing states to pick and choose who gets cov-
ered and what kind of benefits they get —
no doubt with little or no federal oversight.
of beneficiaries, it stands to reason they’d
also be the biggest losers.
But there’s more. Because women have
more chronic health conditions like arthri-
tis, hypertension, and osteoporosis, they’re
more likely to need institutional care. Since
Medicare generally doesn’t cover nursing
home care, Medicaid provides such care
for those with disabilities and/or very low
incomes — and 60 percent of those folks
are women.
What’s not in the budget? Long gone
is the Obama-era effort close the Ging-
rich-Edwards tax loophole that allows
some high-income individuals (possibly
including Donald Trump) to avoid Medi-
care and Social Security payroll taxes alto-
gether, resulting in billions of lost revenue
for both programs.
The House Republican budget probably
won’t pass in its present form. But with
Republican majorities in both houses of
Congress, even compromises are sure to
favor more cuts.
“A Brighter American Future?” Hardly.
This summer’s 53rd anniversary of Medi-
care and Medicaid looks like a less than
happy one for those that depend on them
most — namely women, but really anyone
counting on growing older.
Martha Burk is the director of the Cor-
porate Accountability Project for the Na-
tional Council of Women’s Organizations
(NCWO) and the author of the book Your
Voice, Your Vote. Follow Martha on Twit-
ter @MarthaBurk. Distributed by Other-
Words.org.
Let Me Tell You What Forced Separation Feels Like
U.S.-born kids
behind bars, too
n iCole b raun
The recent images
of immigrant children
in cages are incredi-
bly painful to digest.
Still, many people
seem to forget that
the U.S. has a long
track record of forc-
ibly separating families, whether it was
African Americans during slavery, the Jap-
anese during World War II, Native Ameri-
cans during colonization, or poor children
whose “unfit” single mothers have lost cus-
tody today.
Another common way families are forc-
ibly separated? Juvenile detention.
Tens of thousands of teens and pre-teens
— most often the poor and people of col-
or — are locked up in substandard, often
privatized penal facilities. Children who
go through these forced family separations
often wind up experiencing trauma, grief,
shame, and dehumanization.
The sad reality is incarceration rates are
on the rise alongside economic inequality,
and children aren’t exempt. Quite often,
the only crime these children have commit-
ted is that they’re from vulnerable families
or suffering from mental health issues.
My son and I personally experienced
this.
by
My son became severely depressed
around the time he turned 13. I was a sin-
gle mother teaching as an adjunct, making
less than $20,000 a year, so the treatment
he needed wasn’t available to us.
My son got into the criminal “justice”
system for the initial petty crime of steal-
ing a pair of sneakers, and he remained
there for most of his high school years.
Like so many struggling kids, instead
way, because I knew how the court system
saw me — as a poor single mother with no
husband and a “criminal” son.
From the time he was 14 until he was
18, he was transferred to at least 10 differ-
ent facilities. I often didn’t know where,
because I wasn’t notified. Despite his
chronic depression, he was also put in iso-
lation a number of times — a tactic known
to increase mental suffering among adult
The sad reality is incarceration rates
are on the rise alongside economic
inequality, and children aren’t exempt.
Quite often, the only crime these
children have committed is that they’re
from vulnerable families or suffering
from mental health issues.
of getting the treatment he desperately
needed, he was sent to subpar facilities
that made his emotional pain worse. He
received no real therapy, and they often re-
fused to give him his required medication
or messed it up.
He began to see himself as a number,
as a terrible person. I saw myself the same
prisoners.
At one point, they put him into an adult
jail in isolation for at least a month. He
was 17 and had just been released from
the psych ward that same day. During his
once a week phone calls, I could hear the
increasing desperation in his voice, as well
as the screaming of other adult prisoners in
the background.
As a parent, this experience was devas-
tating and terrorizing. There’s no way to
describe it. The trauma from that pain is
still real now.
My son is older now, thankfully alive,
and doing the hard work of putting his life
back together. “Real therapy would have
been so helpful,” he told me. “So much
pain could have been spared.”
“It really desensitizes people all the
way around,” he said of his experience. “It
makes you value yourself less and others
less, too, since other people see you as a
nonhuman.”
No human should ever be treated this
way. But while we are wounded, we are
not broken.
Social movements are gaining momen-
tum. For example, the immigrant rights
movement is growing alongside the Poor
People’s Economic Human Rights Cam-
paign and other prison liberation move-
ments.
Separating families due to incarcera-
tion, immigration status, mental health,
and/or race and class is wrong. If the fam-
ilies impacted by incarceration and other
traumas join together with advocates for
immigrants, we can create a sea of social
change.
As one of my students recently wrote,
“There are more of us than them.”
Nicole Braun is an adjunct sociology
professor in northern Michigan. Distribut-
ed by OtherWords.org.